Dream XI

I was living in a large, single floor house, along with my uncle, my cousin, and my cousin's daughter and her husband. They had graciously allowed me to stay there, and even given me the use of the den, where I set up a music workshop.

Jim Nabors was also staying there. He was a very untrustworthy character, but he had a kind of charm that could have you agreeing with him, no matter what the proposal; however, once he was done talking, you realized you'd been had, and you never helped him follow through on his schemes.

Today, everyone was out execpt for me, my cousin's daughter, and Jim Nabors. He had already spoken to me about something, and I had agreed with it, only coming to my senses when he had gone off, whistling. He was now trying to convince my cousin's daughter to something about Amazon.com, the bookseller. As I recall, he was trying to get her to buy guns from them, or to convince them that they ought to sell guns. She was hesitant.

For my part, I was moving some of my equipment around, wondering if the Acid software would run on a DOS computer, since the screen was just DOS anyway. I had printed something out, and was sorting through the various print jobs that were still in the output bay. Some of them were on special paper (holes punched, glue areas, etc) and I was putting each kind into a pile. I heard something of Jim Nabor's conversation and I called him over.

"I'm on to your plan," I told him, and continued sorting. He made all kinds of protestations of innocense, saying that he was always being misunderstood and having bad purposes assigned to him. He asked me how I would like this, but I had stopped listening some time ago and was still sorting paper. Distracted, I agreed with him, and when he went off whistling again, I cursed myself for not paying more attention.

He then tried to convince Captain Picard that an 80-page photography magazine was superior to a 128-page one, because the latter was more "work" to read. This sent Picard into a rage, and he said that the 128 page one was better because, even though it was the product of "work," it was done by people who loved photography, and thus it was not work. The 80-page version he condemned as being a "product" to be sold, made by people who didn't care about photography, and could, in fact, be doing almost anything else.